The present invention relates to a telephone system having an ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) function of automatically and uniformly distributing an incoming call to a predetermined telephone set group and, more particularly, to a telephone system which transfers an ACDQ (ACD Queuing) call when an ACD telephone set group has no telephone sets capable of responding to an incoming call, and an ACDQ call transfer method.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 5-284284 proposes, as a conventional telephone system having an ACD function, a telephone system which responds to an incoming call as required even when an ACD telephone set group is in an incoming call rejecting state, thereby improving the service to callers.
For a conventional ACDQ function, a plurality of telephone sets (to be referred to as agents hereinafter) which are connected to a plurality of stations and exclusively handle ACDQ incoming calls are divided into several groups (to be referred to as agent groups hereinafter).
As shown in FIG. 5, when an incoming call takes place in the ACDQ group, the CPU (Central Processing Unit) of a switching center determines whether the incoming call is an ACDQ call (step S51). If NO in step S51, the CPU performs normal call termination processing (step S52).
If YES in step S51, an agent group for receiving the ACDQ call is determined (step S53). It is determined whether an idle agent is present in the determined agent group (step S54). If YES in step S54, ACDQ call termination processing for the agent is performed (step S56).
If NO in step S54, queuing processing is performed (step S55) until an agent becomes idle.
However, the conventional telephone system having the ACDQ function has a problem that, when there are no idle agents, the ACDQ call is queued to make the caller wait for a response. Even when an agent belonging to the same agent group and connected to another station is idle, the ACDQ call is queued as long as all the agents belonging to the same agent group and connected to the station in which the call is incoming first are busy.